Left with her husband, Maggie, however, for the time, said nothing; she
only felt, on the spot, a strong, sharp wish not to see his face again
till he should have had a minute to arrange it. She had seen it enough
for her temporary clearness and her next movement—seen it as it showed
during the stare of surprise that followed his entrance. Then it was
that she knew how hugely expert she had been made, for judging it
quickly, by that vision of it, indelibly registered for reference, that
had flashed a light into her troubled soul the night of his late return
from Matcham. The expression worn by it at that juncture, for however
few instants, had given her a sense of its possibilities, one of the
most relevant of which might have been playing up for her, before
the consummation of Fanny Assingham’s retreat, just long enough to
be recognised. What she had recognised in it was HIS recognition,
the result of his having been forced, by the flush of their visitor’s
attitude and the unextinguished report of her words, to take account
of the flagrant signs of the accident, of the incident, on which he
had unexpectedly dropped. He had, not unnaturally, failed to see this
occurrence represented by the three fragments of an object apparently
valuable which lay there on the floor and which, even across the width
of the room, his kept interval, reminded him, unmistakably though
confusedly, of something known, some other unforgotten image. That was a
mere shock, that was a pain—as if Fanny’s violence had been a violence
redoubled and acting beyond its intention, a violence calling up the hot
blood as a blow across the mouth might have called it. Maggie knew as
she turned away from him that she didn’t want his pain; what she wanted
was her own simple certainty—not the red mark of conviction flaming
there in his beauty. If she could have gone on with bandaged eyes she
would have liked that best; if it were a question of saying what she
now, apparently, should have to, and of taking from him what he would
say, any blindness that might wrap it would be the nearest approach to a
boon.
She went in silence to where her friend—never, in intention, visibly,
so much her friend as at that moment—had braced herself to so amazing
an energy, and there, under Amerigo’s eyes, she picked up the shining
pieces. Bedizened and jewelled, in her rustling finery, she paid,
with humility of attitude, this prompt tribute to order—only to find,
however, that she could carry but two of the fragments at once. She
brought them over to the chimney-piece, to the conspicuous place
occupied by the cup before Fanny’s appropriation of it, and, after
laying them carefully down, went back for what remained, the solid
detached foot. With this she returned to the mantel-shelf, placing
it with deliberation in the centre and then, for a minute, occupying
herself as with the attempt to fit the other morsels together. The
split, determined by the latent crack, was so sharp and so neat that if
there had been anything to hold them the bowl might still, quite
beautifully, a few steps away, have passed for uninjured. But, as there
was, naturally, nothing to hold them but Maggie’s hands, during the few
moments the latter were so employed, she could only lay the almost equal
parts of the vessel carefully beside their pedestal and leave them thus
before her husband’s eyes. She had proceeded without words, but quite as
if with a sought effect-in spite of which it had all seemed to her to
take a far longer time than anything she had ever so quickly
accomplished. Amerigo said nothing either-though it was true that his
silence had the gloss of the warning she doubtless appeared to admonish
him to take: it was as if her manner hushed him to the proper
observation of what she was doing. He should have no doubt of it
whatever: she _knew_ and her broken bowl was proof that she knew-yet the
least part of her desire was to make him waste words. He would have to
think-this she knew even better still; and all she was for the present
concerned with was that he should be aware. She had taken him for aware
all day, or at least for obscurely and instinctively anxious-as to that
she had just committed herself to Fanny Assingham; but what she had been
wrong about was the effect of his anxiety. His fear of staying away, as
a marked symptom, had at least proved greater than his fear of coming in
; he had come in even at the risk of bringing it with him-and, ah, what
more did she require now than her sense, established within the first
minute or two, that he had brought it, however he might be steadying
himself against dangers of betrayal by some wrong word, and that it was
shut in there between them, the successive moments throbbing under it
the while as the pulse of fever throbs under the doctor’s thumb?
Maggie’s sense, in fine, in his presence, was that though the bowl had been
broken, her reason hadn’t ; the reason for which she had made up her mind,
the reason for which she had summoned her friend, the reason for which she
had prepared the place for her husband’s eyes ; it was all one reason, and,
as her intense little clutch held the matter, what had happened by Fanny’s
act and by his apprehension of it had not in the least happened to
_her_ but absolutely and directly to himself, as he must proceed to
take in. There it was that her wish for time interposed-time for Amerigo’s
use, not for hers, since she, for ever so long now, for hours and hours as
they seemed, had been living with eternity; with which she would continue to
live. She wanted to say to him, “ Take it, take it, take all you need of it
; arrange yourself so as to suffer least, or to be, at any rate, least
distorted and disfigured Only _see_ see that _I_ see, and make
up your mind, on this new basis, at your convenience. Wait-it won’t be
long-till you can confer again with Charlotte, for you’ll do it much better
then-more easily to both of us. Above all don’t show me, till you’ve got it
well under, the dreadful blur, the ravage of suspense and embarrassment,
produced, and produced by my doing, in your personal serenity, your
incomparable superiority.”
After she had squared again her little objects on the chimney, she was
within an ace, in fact, of turning on him with that appeal; besides its
being lucid for her, all the while, that the occasion was passing, that
they were dining out, that he wasn’t dressed, and that, though she
herself was, she was yet, in all probability, so horribly red in the
face and so awry, in many ways, with agitation, that in view of the
Ambassador’s company, of possible comments and constructions, she should
need, before her glass, some restoration of appearances.
Amerigo, meanwhile, after all, could clearly make the most of her
having enjoined on him to wait—suggested it by the positive pomp of
her dealings with the smashed cup; to wait, that is, till she should
pronounce as Mrs. Assingham had promised for her. This delay, again,
certainly tested her presence of mind—though that strain was not
what presently made her speak. Keep her eyes, for the time, from her
husband’s as she might, she soon found herself much more drivingly
conscious of the strain on his own wit. There was even a minute,
when her back was turned to him, during which she knew once more the
strangeness of her desire to spare him, a strangeness that had already,
fifty times, brushed her, in the depth of her trouble, as with the
wild wing of some bird of the air who might blindly have swooped for
an instant into the shaft of a well, darkening there by his momentary
flutter the far-off round of sky. It was extraordinary, this quality in
the taste of her wrong which made her completed sense of it seem rather
to soften than to harden and it was the more extraordinary the more she
had to recognise it; for what it came to was that seeing herself finally
sure, knowing everything, having the fact, in all its abomination, so
utterly before her that there was nothing else to add—what it came to
was that, merely by being WITH him there in silence, she felt, within
her, the sudden split between conviction and action. They had begun to
cease, on the spot, surprisingly, to be connected; conviction, that is,
budged no inch, only planting its feet the more firmly in the soil—but
action began to hover like some lighter and larger, but easier form,
excited by its very power to keep above ground. It would be free, it
would be independent, it would go in—wouldn’t it?—for some prodigious
and superior adventure of its own. What would condemn it, so to speak,
to the responsibility of freedom—this glimmered on Maggie even now—was
the possibility, richer with every lapsing moment, that her husband
would have, on the whole question, a new need of her, a need which was
in fact being born between them in these very seconds. It struck her
truly as so new that he would have felt hitherto none to compare with
it at all; would indeed, absolutely, by this circumstance, be REALLY
needing her for the first one in their whole connection. No, he had used
her, had even exceedingly enjoyed her, before this; but there had been
no precedent for that character of a proved necessity to him which she
was rapidly taking on. The immense advantage of this particular clue,
moreover, was that she should have now to arrange, alter, to falsify
nothing; should have to be but consistently simple and straight. She
asked herself, with concentration, while her back was still presented,
what would be the very ideal of that method; after which, the next
instant, it had all come to her and she had turned round upon him for
the application. “Fanny Assingham broke it—knowing it had a crack and
that it would go if she used sufficient force. She thought, when I had
told her, that that would be the best thing to do with it—thought so
from her own point of view. That hadn’t been at all my idea, but she
acted before I understood. I had, on the contrary,” she explained, “put
it here, in full view, exactly that you might see.”
He stood with his hands in his pockets; he had carried his eyes to the
fragments on the chimney-piece, and she could already distinguish the
element of relief, absolutely of succour, in his acceptance from her of
the opportunity to consider the fruits of their friend’s violence—every
added inch of reflection and delay having the advantage, from this point
on, of counting for him double. It had operated within her now to the
last intensity, her glimpse of the precious truth that by her helping
him, helping him to help himself, as it were, she should help him to
help HER. Hadn’t she fairly got into his labyrinth with him?—wasn’t she
indeed in the very act of placing herself there, for him, at its centre
and core, whence, on that definite orientation and by an instinct all
her own, she might securely guide him out of it? She offered him thus,
assuredly, a kind of support that was not to have been imagined in
advance, and that moreover required—ah most truly!—some close looking
at before it could be believed in and pronounced void of treachery.
“Yes, look, look,” she seemed to see him hear her say even while her
sounded words were other—“look, look, both at the truth that still
survives in that smashed evidence and at the even more remarkable
appearance that I’m not such a fool as you supposed me. Look at the
possibility that, since I AM different, there may still be something
in it for you—if you’re capable of working with me to get that out.
Consider of course, as you must, the question of what you may have to
surrender, on your side, what price you may have to pay, whom you may
have to pay WITH, to set this advantage free; but take in, at any rate,
that there is something for you if you don’t too blindly spoil your
chance for it.” He went no nearer the damnatory pieces, but he eyed
them, from where he stood, with a degree of recognition just visibly
less to be dissimulated; all of which represented for her a certain
traceable process. And her uttered words, meanwhile, were different
enough from those he might have inserted between the lines of her
already-spoken. “It’s the golden bowl, you know, that you saw at the
little antiquario’s in Bloomsbury, so long ago—when you went there with
Charlotte, when you spent those hours with her, unknown to me, a day or
two before our marriage. It was shown you both, but you didn’t take
it; you left it for me, and I came upon it, extraordinarily, through
happening to go into the same shop on Monday last; in walking home, in
prowling about to pick up some small old thing for father’s birthday,
after my visit to the Museum, my appointment there with Mr. Crichton,
of which I told you. It was shown me, and I was struck with it and took
it—knowing nothing about it at the time. What I now know I’ve learned
since—I learned this afternoon, a couple of hours ago; receiving from
it naturally a great impression. So there it is—in its three pieces.
You can handle them—don’t be afraid—if you want to make sure the thing
is the thing you and Charlotte saw together. Its having come apart makes
an unfortunate difference for its beauty, its artistic value, but none
for anything else. Its other value is just the same—I mean that of its
having given me so much of the truth about you. I don’t therefore so
much care what becomes of it now—unless perhaps you may yourself, when
you come to think, have some good use for it. In that case,” Maggie
wound up, “we can easily take the pieces with us to Fawns.”
It was wonderful how she felt, by the time she had seen herself through
this narrow pass, that she had really achieved something—that she was
emerging a little, in fine, with the prospect less contracted. She had
done for him, that is, what her instinct enjoined; had laid a basis not
merely momentary on which he could meet her. When, by the turn of his
head, he did finally meet her, this was the last thing that glimmered
out of his look; but it came into sight, none the less, as a perception
of his distress and almost as a question of his eyes; so that, for still
another minute, before he committed himself, there occurred between them
a kind of unprecedented moral exchange over which her superior lucidity
presided. It was not, however, that when he did commit himself the show
was promptly portentous. “But what in the world has Fanny Assingham had
to do with it?”
She could verily, out of all her smothered soreness, almost have smiled:
his question so affected her as giving the whole thing up to her. But
it left her only to go the straighter. “She has had to do with it that
I immediately sent for her and that she immediately came. She was the
first person I wanted to see—because I knew she would know. Know more
about what I had learned, I mean, than I could make out for myself. I
made out as much as I could for myself—that I also wanted to have done;
but it didn’t, in spite of everything, take me very far, and she has
really been a help. Not so much as she would like to be—not so much as,
poor dear, she just now tried to be; yet she has done her very best for
you—never forget that!—and has kept me along immeasurably better than
I should have been able to come without her. She has gained me time; and
that, these three months, don’t you see? has been everything.”
She had said “Don’t you see?” on purpose, and was to feel the next
moment that it had acted. “These three months’?” the Prince asked.
“Counting from the night you came home so late from Matcham. Counting
from the hours you spent with Charlotte at Gloucester; your visit to the
cathedral—which you won’t have forgotten describing to me in so much
detail. For that was the beginning of my being sure. Before it I had
been sufficiently in doubt. Sure,” Maggie developed, “of your having,
and of your having for a long time had, TWO relations with Charlotte.”
He stared, a little at sea, as he took it up. “Two—?”
Something in the tone of it gave it a sense, or an ambiguity, almost
foolish—leaving Maggie to feel, as in a flash, how such a consequence,
a foredoomed infelicity, partaking of the ridiculous even in one of the
cleverest, might be of the very essence of the penalty of wrong-doing.
“Oh, you may have had fifty—had the same relation with her fifty times!
It’s of the number of KINDS of relation with her that I speak—a number
that doesn’t matter, really, so long as there wasn’t only one kind, as
father and I supposed. One kind,” she went on, “was there before us;
we took that fully for granted, as you saw, and accepted it. We never
thought of there being another, kept out of our sight. But after the
evening I speak of I knew there was something else. As I say, I had,
before that, my idea—which you never dreamed I had. From the moment I
speak of it had more to go upon, and you became yourselves, you and
she, vaguely, yet uneasily, conscious of the difference. But it’s within
these last hours that I’ve most seen where we are; and as I’ve been in
communication with Fanny Assingham about my doubts, so I wanted to let
her know my certainty—with the determination of which, however, you
must understand, she has had nothing to do. She defends you,” Maggie
remarked.
He had given her all his attention, and with this impression for
her, again, that he was, in essence, fairly reaching out to her for
time—time, only time—she could sufficiently imagine, and to whatever
strangeness, that he absolutely liked her to talk, even at the cost of
his losing almost everything else by it. It was still, for a minute, as
if he waited for something worse; wanted everything that was in her to
come out, any definite fact, anything more precisely nameable, so that
he too—as was his right—should know where he was. What stirred in him
above all, while he followed in her face the clear train of her speech,
must have been the impulse to take up something she put before him that
he was yet afraid directly to touch. He wanted to make free with it, but
had to keep his hands off—for reasons he had already made out; and
the discomfort of his privation yearned at her out of his eyes with an
announcing gleam of the fever, the none too tolerable chill, of specific
recognition. She affected him as speaking more or less for her father as
well, and his eyes might have been trying to hypnotise her into giving
him the answer without his asking the question. “Had HE his idea, and
has he now, with you, anything more?”—those were the words he had to
hold himself from not speaking and that she would as yet, certainly,
do nothing to make easy. She felt with her sharpest thrill how he was
straitened and tied, and with the miserable pity of it her present
conscious purpose of keeping him so could none the less perfectly
accord. To name her father, on any such basis of anxiety, of
compunction, would be to do the impossible thing, to do neither more nor
less than give Charlotte away. Visibly, palpably, traceably, he stood
off from this, moved back from it as from an open chasm now suddenly
perceived, but which had been, between the two, with so much, so
strangely much else, quite uncalculated. Verily it towered before
her, this history of their confidence. They had built strong and piled
high—based as it was on such appearances—their conviction that, thanks
to her native complacencies of so many sorts, she would always, quite to
the end and through and through, take them as nobly sparing her. Amerigo
was at any rate having the sensation of a particular ugliness to avoid,
a particular difficulty to count with, that practically found him as
unprepared as if he had been, like his wife, an abjectly simple person.
And she meanwhile, however abjectly simple, was further discerning, for
herself, that, whatever he might have to take from her—she being, on
her side, beautifully free—he would absolutely not be able, for any
qualifying purpose, to name Charlotte either. As his father-in-law’s
wife Mrs. Verver rose between them there, for the time, in august and
prohibitive form; to protect her, defend her, explain about her, was,
at the least, to bring her into the question—which would be by the
same stroke to bring her husband. But this was exactly the door Maggie
wouldn’t open to him; on all of which she was the next moment asking
herself if, thus warned and embarrassed, he were not fairly writhing in
his pain. He writhed, on that hypothesis, some seconds more, for it was
not till then that he had chosen between what he could do and what he
couldn’t.
“You’re apparently drawing immense conclusions from very small
matters. Won’t you perhaps feel, in fairness, that you’re striking out,
triumphing, or whatever I may call it, rather too easily—feel it when
I perfectly admit that your smashed cup there does come back to me? I
frankly confess, now, to the occasion, and to having wished not to
speak of it to you at the time. We took two or three hours together, by
arrangement; it WAS on the eve of my marriage—at the moment you say.
But that put it on the eve of yours too, my dear—which was directly the
point. It was desired to find for you, at the eleventh hour, some
small wedding-present—a hunt, for something worth giving you, and yet
possible from other points of view as well, in which it seemed I could
be of use. You were naturally not to be told—precisely because it was
all FOR you. We went forth together and we looked; we rummaged about
and, as I remember we called it, we prowled; then it was that, as I
freely recognise, we came across that crystal cup—which I’m bound to
say, upon my honour, I think it rather a pity Fanny Assingham, from
whatever good motive, should have treated so.” He had kept his hands in
his pockets; he turned his eyes again, but more complacently now, to the
ruins of the precious vessel; and Maggie could feel him exhale into the
achieved quietness of his explanation a long, deep breath of comparative
relief. Behind everything, beneath everything, it was somehow a comfort
to him at last to be talking with her—and he seemed to be proving to
himself that he COULD talk. “It was at a little shop in Bloomsbury—I
think I could go to the place now. The man understood Italian, I
remember; he wanted awfully to work off his bowl. But I didn’t believe
in it, and we didn’t take it.”
Maggie had listened with an interest that wore all the expression of
candour. “Oh, you left it for me. But what did you take?”
He looked at her; first as if he were trying to remember, then as if he
might have been trying to forget. “Nothing, I think—at that place.”
“What did you take then at any other? What did you get me—since that
was your aim and end—for a wedding-gift?”
The Prince continued very nobly to bethink himself. “Didn’t we get you
anything?”
Maggie waited a little; she had for some time, now, kept her eyes on him
steadily; but they wandered, at this, to the fragments on her chimney.
“Yes; it comes round, after all, to your having got me the bowl. I
myself was to come upon it, the other day, by so wonderful a chance; was
to find it in the same place and to have it pressed upon me by the same
little man, who does, as you say, understand Italian. I did ‘believe in
it,’ you see—must have believed in it somehow instinctively; for I took
it as soon as I saw it. Though I didn’t know at all then,” she added,
“what I was taking WITH it.”
The Prince paid her for an instant, visibly, the deference of trying
to imagine what this might have been. “I agree with you that the
coincidence is extraordinary—the sort of thing that happens mainly in
novels and plays. But I don’t see, you must let me say, the importance
or the connexion—”
“Of my having made the purchase where you failed of it?” She had quickly
taken him up; but she had, with her eyes on him once more, another drop
into the order of her thoughts, to which, through whatever he might say,
she was still adhering. “It’s not my having gone into the place, at the
end of four years, that makes the strangeness of the coincidence; for
don’t such chances as that, in London, easily occur? The strangeness,”
she lucidly said, “is in what my purchase was to represent to me after
I had got it home; which value came,” she explained, “from the wonder of
my having found such a friend.”
“‘Such a friend’?” As a wonder, assuredly, her husband could but take
it.
“As the little man in the shop. He did for me more than he knew—I owe
it to him. He took an interest in me,” Maggie said; “and, taking that
interest, he recalled your visit, he remembered you and spoke of you to
me.”
On which the Prince passed the comment of a sceptical smile. “Ah but, my
dear, if extraordinary things come from people’s taking an interest in
you—”
“My life in that case,” she asked, “must be very agitated? Well, he
liked me, I mean—very particularly. It’s only so I can account for my
afterwards hearing from him—and in fact he gave me that to-day,” she
pursued, “he gave me it frankly as his reason.”
“To-day?” the Prince inquiringly echoed.
But she was singularly able—it had been marvellously “given” her, she
afterwards said to herself—to abide, for her light, for her clue, by
her own order.
“I inspired him with sympathy—there you are! But the miracle is that
he should have a sympathy to offer that could be of use to me. That was
really the oddity of my chance,” the Princess proceeded—“that I should
have been moved, in my ignorance, to go precisely to him.”
He saw her so keep her course that it was as if he could, at the best,
but stand aside to watch her and let her pass; he only made a vague
demonstration that was like an ineffective gesture. “I’m sorry to say
any ill of your friends, and the thing was a long time ago; besides
which there was nothing to make me recur to it. But I remember the man’s
striking me as a decided little beast.”
She gave a slow headshake—as if, no, after consideration, not THAT way
were an issue. “I can only think of him as kind, for he had nothing to
gain. He had in fact only to lose. It was what he came to tell me—that
he had asked me too high a price, more than the object was really worth.
There was a particular reason, which he hadn’t mentioned, and which had
made him consider and repent. He wrote for leave to see me again—wrote
in such terms that I saw him here this afternoon.”
“Here?”—it made the Prince look about him.
“Downstairs—in the little red room. While he was waiting he looked at
the few photographs that stand about there and recognised two of them.
Though it was so long ago, he remembered the visit made him by the lady
and the gentleman, and that gave him his connexion. It gave me mine,
for he remembered everything and told me everything. You see you too had
produced your effect; only, unlike you, he had thought of it again—he
HAD recurred to it. He told me of your having wished to make each other
presents—but of that’s not having come off. The lady was greatly taken
with the piece I had bought of him, but you had your reason against
receiving it from her, and you had been right. He would think that of
you more than ever now,” Maggie went on; “he would see how wisely you
had guessed the flaw and how easily the bowl could be broken. I had
bought it myself, you see, for a present—he knew I was doing that. This
was what had worked in him—especially after the price I had paid.”
Her story had dropped an instant; she still brought it out in small
waves of energy, each of which spent its force; so that he had an
opportunity to speak before this force was renewed. But the quaint thing
was what he now said. “And what, pray, WAS the price?”
She paused again a little. “It was high, certainly—for those fragments.
I think I feel, as I look at them there, rather ashamed to say.”
The Prince then again looked at them; he might have been growing used to
the sight. “But shall you at least get your money back?”
“Oh, I’m far from wanting it back—I feel so that I’m getting its
worth.” With which, before he could reply, she had a quick transition.
“The great fact about the day we’re talking of seems to me to have been,
quite remarkably, that no present was then made me. If your undertaking
had been for that, that was not at least what came of it.”
“You received then nothing at all?” The Prince looked vague and grave,
almost retrospectively concerned.
“Nothing but an apology for empty hands and empty pockets; which was
made me—as if it mattered a mite!—ever so frankly, ever so beautifully
and touchingly.”
This Amerigo heard with interest, yet not with confusion. “Ah, of course
you couldn’t have minded!” Distinctly, as she went on, he was getting
the better of the mere awkwardness of his arrest; quite as if making out
that he need SUFFER arrest from her now—before they should go forth
to show themselves in the world together—in no greater quantity than
an occasion ill-chosen at the best for a scene might decently make room
for. He looked at his watch; their engagement, all the while, remained
before him. “But I don’t make out, you see, what case against me you
rest—”
“On everything I’m telling you? Why, the whole case—the case of your
having for so long so successfully deceived me. The idea of your finding
something for me—charming as that would have been—was what had least
to do with your taking a morning together at that moment. What had
really to do with it,” said Maggie, “was that you had to: you couldn’t
not, from the moment you were again face to face. And the reason of
that was that there had been so much between you before—before I came
between you at all.”
Her husband had been for these last moments moving about under her eyes;
but at this, as to check any show of impatience, he again stood still.
“You’ve never been more sacred to me than you were at that hour—unless
perhaps you’ve become so at this one.”
The assurance of his speech, she could note, quite held up its head in
him; his eyes met her own so, for the declaration, that it was as if
something cold and momentarily unimaginable breathed upon her, from
afar off, out of his strange consistency. She kept her direction still,
however, under that. “Oh, the thing I’ve known best of all is that
you’ve never wanted, together, to offend us. You’ve wanted quite
intensely not to, and the precautions you’ve had to take for it have
been for a long time one of the strongest of my impressions. That, I
think,” she added, “is the way I’ve best known.”
“Known?” he repeated after a moment.
“Known. Known that you were older friends, and so much more intimate
ones, than I had any reason to suppose when we married. Known there were
things that hadn’t been told me—and that gave their meaning, little by
little, to other things that were before me.”
“Would they have made a difference, in the matter of our marriage,” the
Prince presently asked, “if you HAD known them?”
She took her time to think. “I grant you not—in the matter of OURS.”
And then as he again fixed her with his hard yearning, which he couldn’t
keep down: “The question is so much bigger than that. You see how
much what I know makes of it for me.” That was what acted on him, this
iteration of her knowledge, into the question of the validity, of the
various bearings of which, he couldn’t on the spot trust himself
to pretend, in any high way, to go. What her claim, as she made it,
represented for him—that he couldn’t help betraying, if only as a
consequence of the effect of the word itself, her repeated distinct
“know, know,” on his nerves. She was capable of being sorry for his
nerves at a time when he should need them for dining out, pompously,
rather responsibly, without his heart in it; yet she was not to let that
prevent her using, with all economy, so precious a chance for supreme
clearness. “I didn’t force this upon you, you must recollect, and it
probably wouldn’t have happened for you if you hadn’t come in.”
“Ah,” said the Prince, “I was liable to come in, you know.”
“I didn’t think you were this evening.”
“And why not?”
“Well,” she answered, “you have many liabilities—of different sorts.”
With which she recalled what she had said to Fanny Assingham. “And then
you’re so deep.”
It produced in his features, in spite of his control of them, one of
those quick plays of expression, the shade of a grimace, that testified
as nothing else did to his race. “It’s you, cara, who are deep.”
Which, after an instant, she had accepted from him; she could so feel at
last that it was true. “Then I shall have need of it all.”
“But what would you have done,” he was by this time asking, “if I HADN’T
come in?”
“I don’t know.” She had hesitated. “What would you?”
“Oh; I oh—that isn’t the question. I depend upon you. I go on. You would
have spoken to-morrow?”
“I think I would have waited.”
“And for what?” he asked.
“To see what difference it would make for myself. My possession at last,
I mean, of real knowledge.”
“Oh!” said the Prince.
“My only point now, at any rate,” she went on, “is the difference, as I
say, that it may make for YOU. Your knowing was—from the moment you did
come in—all I had in view.” And she sounded it again—he should have it
once more. “Your knowing that I’ve ceased—”
“That you’ve ceased—?” With her pause, in fact, she had fairly made him
press her for it.
“Why, to be as I was. NOT to know.”
It was once more then, after a little, that he had had to stand
receptive; yet the singular effect of this was that there was still
something of the same sort he was made to want. He had another
hesitation, but at last this odd quantity showed. “Then does any one
else know?”
It was as near as he could come to naming her father, and she kept him
at that distance. “Any one—?”
“Any one, I mean, but Fanny Assingham.”
“I should have supposed you had had by this time particular means of
learning. I don’t see,” she said, “why you ask me.”
Then, after an instant—and only after an instant, as she saw—he made
out what she meant; and it gave her, all strangely enough, the still
further light that Charlotte, for herself, knew as little as he had
known. The vision loomed, in this light, it fairly glared, for the
few seconds—the vision of the two others alone together at Fawns, and
Charlotte, as one of them, having gropingly to go on, always not knowing
and not knowing! The picture flushed at the same time with all its
essential colour—that of the so possible identity of her father’s
motive and principle with her own. HE was “deep,” as Amerigo called it,
so that no vibration of the still air should reach his daughter; just
as she had earned that description by making and by, for that matter,
intending still to make, her care for his serenity, or at any rate
for the firm outer shell of his dignity, all marvellous enamel, her
paramount law. More strangely even than anything else, her husband
seemed to speak now but to help her in this. “I know nothing but what
you tell me.”
“Then I’ve told you all I intended. Find out the rest—!”
“Find it out—?” He waited.
She stood before him a moment—it took that time to go on. Depth upon
depth of her situation, as she met his face, surged and sank within her;
but with the effect somehow, once more, that they rather lifted her than
let her drop. She had her feet somewhere, through it all—it was her
companion, absolutely, who was at sea. And she kept her feet; she
pressed them to what was beneath her. She went over to the bell beside
the chimney and gave a ring that he could but take as a summons for her
maid. It stopped everything for the present; it was an intimation to him
to go and dress. But she had to insist. “Find out for yourself!”